Xun Liu
Responsive Interfaces in Landscape Architecture
The advancement and availability of the off-the-shelf tools have increased accessibility to designers to hack and re-purpose as their customized tools, and to prototype innovative design strategies. The increasingly powerful computing capacity and ubiquity of networked and open-sourced technologies has expanded the definition of interface as computer display to a broader meaning: a shared boundary where independent systems interact, communicate and exchange information. The exchange can be between software, hardware, human, environment, and combinations of these, and can be controlled as either linear open-loop system or responsive closed-loop system. This broader definition of interface applies to various types of dynamic interactions between the physical and digital world across scale. As for landscape architects, the act of adaptive response across scale is inherent in our discipline, we can see the potential impact of responsive technologies in shifting the design methodologies and providing new perspectives of understanding landscape.
Grounded in the interdisciplinary field of Human Computer Interaction and landscape architecture, the dissertation focuses on the four key processes in the design of interface: sensing, processing, actuating and response. Each process also associates with multidisciplinary knowledge, such as computer science, data science and robotics. The research borrows from the innovations and concepts from these disciplines to discuss the possibility to hack, integrate and customize design tools, with specific focuses on three properties of the interface: materiality, intelligence and human-factor. The potential influence will be mutual to both disciplines. Coupling the key properties in the responsive interface and the core themes in landscape architecture, there are three values of this “new paradigm”. On the face of it, the customized tool can improve efficiency and performance. It provokes inspirations for new adaptive methodologies and also potentially new aesthetics. There may be a third value in understanding the concepts behind the technologies and algorithms and the implications of a shift in perspective to understand the construction of dynamic systems in landscape.
Lastly, the dissertation will experiment with customizing responsive interfaces on specific projects in academia and landscape practice. The four technical processes and the response to the three properties will be illustrated in detail under the discussion of augmented hydrodynamic simulation interface, automated urban massing interface, and cognitive landscape image interface, etc. The customized interface aims to critique current linear and static workflow. The goal of customizing our own responsive interface of design tools is to envision and invent the future. Hopefully, the dissertation will not only provide insights in design methodologies for landscape architects, but also the methodologies of designing the design.